Join the Access developer research panel

I don't like the tone of some developers here. I can understand some frustration some time, but arrogance, sarcasm and insult is not the way to get things done. I worked 16 years for a company like Microsoft. There's a lot a of people and sometime our little demand impact so many other stuff and people. When you work with all the persons involve, you realize that at the end of the day almost everyone is doing is best. So for me, yes sometime I have frustration about the product, but with this product I make a pretty good living. I'm able to pay my bills by working from home. The only fact that you are trying to add some new feature gives me hope for the future. Access is as today, a very important product for small and medium company and it will be for a long time in the future even with the AI revolution!! I think kindness and patience is the way to go here.
Thanks Linda for what you and your team does and let me know if you need anything I can do to help.

Keep the good work.

GontranHarvey
Since your message is probably targeted at my comment: You are right, thanks for the reminder. We should not forget that the Access dev team (probably understaffed, like all IT teams nowadays) deserves a big "thank you" for providing us with such a great platform on which we can build our applications.

The reason for the current frustration is twofold. One issue is stability, the other is lack of communication.

In the last months/years, an unusual amount of bugs made it into the production release (mostly affecting the Current Channel, but in some cases also the Enterprise and/or LTSC channels). If you use Access as a runtime platform, your customers don't see Access crashing, they see your application crashing. And you can't point your customers to an official KB article describing the bug and the expected release date of a fix, because, more often than not, there is none.

I understand that the Access team is trying to make the best out of it, and if my comment came across as unkind, I sincerely apologize. From our outside perspective, we usually only see the product, not the PM having to personally take care of spam filtering. Thank you for your efforts, and I keep my fingers crossed that you get the manpower and resources you need to give this great product the love it deserves.

Let me be honest: If you want feedback from developers, provide us with a way to submit bug reports and actually get a response from the development team. You know, something like a github issue tracker.

Yes, there's the feedback button in MS Access, but us mere mortals won't even get a response there. Currently, the only way to get the attention of the MS Access dev team is by bothering one of the MVPs (i.e., by creating extra work for those hard-working volunteers).

We're developers. We know how to write bug reports and how to create minimal reproducible examples. Telling us to fill out surveys where we "rank the likelihood of recommending feature X to a friend on a scale of 1 to 10" instead just adds insult to injury.

If the hat fits you, wear it, if not... don't.

It is a general thought not just for this trend.

By the way, I don't want to be on my high horse here. If I don't check myself, I am that guy. I was a lot in the past.
It's just that at one point I realize that if you’re the one who's always trying to make things append with arrogance and sarcasm , at some point people stop listening to you, even if you are right.

That's the reason sometimes you know you had the best idea but it was not implemented.

Happy programming guys.

😀

I'm glad to join this group and I'm looking forward to providing feedback on the future of Access. 

The Access Team may be overworked and understaffed, but I want to say that making an occasional post of progress or a public response to a user question goes a long way in letting the community of Access developers know they are relevant.

We're here because we're fans of Access.  Please keep us in the loop.  😊

Linda,

Would you put this in the context of the Feedback Portal.  How does this differ?  Does this replace the former?  Are they complimentary in some manner.  I'm trying to understand what each is/does, where to actually invest time and energies into.  Which one you are actually paying attention to and in which way?

I was always under the impression that UserVoice and now Feedback Portal was the means for the average user to communicate bugs, requests, frustrations, ... to you.  Has this now changed?

Thank you.

Exactly the same comment here that HeinziAT has made.  I was looking forward to having a look at the plans and being a part of the process going forward, but I too didn't click the link until just the next day, only to be disappointed.

Please, firstly, we are all busy people, so consider extending those sort of things and maybe you might get better responses.  Secondly, as mentioned before, at least tell us about an expiry.

I am sure all of us Access developers are really enthusiastic about Access, despite the constant rumours about its demise, but these aren't helped by the way MS appears to consider it.  Hidden away now on the Microsoft 365 pages as if it didn't exist, totally missing in the change logs when really important fixes have been added and so on. 

I'm developing Access sDB's since 1991. For 15 years I had a direct email to a guy from MS Access Team. Since then he went retired. I could solve isues with him and I have reported lot of bugs including udocumented keywords and functions in Access.

Since MS comercializatiom, frankly said MS is NOT listening. 

I dont' how many people wrote about need of new IDE for VBA, and we still use the same we had back with access 1.0.
Access is outdated and 15 years behind moderm IDE. And then they removeed ADP's 10 years ago.

DatePicker, Calendar controls, etc are made in 90's same time cinemas played Back to the Future...

MS Access has been abandoned many years ago and there is no fresh blood to push the project forward.

On the other hand the beauty with Access is that apps made in 90's still work well. :))

Why there is no Access Runtime for Mac OS? It would be a huge boost being able to develop for Mac. Huge!
Ms Access Team start to listen, please!. Not sure the new portal helps, but let's give them a chance.

Greg

"I don't like the tone of some developers here. I can understand some frustration some time, but arrogance, sarcasm and insult is not the way to get things done"

Oh please, nothing was said in a rude manner.  People are allowed to express themselves, provide feedback, ask questions.  Those are the things the Dev Team actually needs to read as long as it is done civilly, which it was!

There was nothing wrong with any of the above.  If you want I can provide tons of links far worse to put things into proper context.

It would be nice to know the deadline for surveys. Apparently it's less than 24 hours, which is a bit... short.

Story from today:

At 05:10 CEST I received an invitation to fill out the "Access developer feature survey". I looked at the questions, prepared a draft and sent it to my team to get their input. (I want our feedback to be useful and make sure we don't accidentally send you our second-most important pain point instead of the most important one. 🙂 )

Right now, at 21:51 CEST, I tried to submit the answers, only to get a "This survey is no longer accepting submissions. Thank you for your interest." message when clicking on the survey link. 😞